Student4Life

My brother is here visiting with me, taking a few weeks of leave after 10 months in Iraq. Usually when he comes to visit we hunker down with a PC game and just veg out nights and weekends slaying monsters. The last time he visited our game of choice was Dungeon Siege. This time around, two years later, we’ve chosen something similar in name and just as much fun: Dungeon Runners.

It’s an NCSoft game, the same NCSoft responsible for Tabula Rasa and Lineage. It’s free to play and you get perks for paying $5/month for membership which is what we’ve done and now I want to get the most out of the game. For me that means getting it running within Linux and I think I’ve found just the way.

Naturally, as it’s a Windows game, the first stop on the research locomotive is WineHQ to see how well the software runs under Wine. Dungeon Runners doesn’t. At least not by default.

Navigating the winding path to Dungeon Runners installation leads you to the NCSoft downloader/launcher which is where you get hung up on a huge snag. Dungeon Runners relies on the launcher to run and the launcher relies on Microsoft .net, which we all know isn’t a friend of Wine.

Next up, download the latest version of the game installer (bypassing the NCSoft downloader/launcher) from the Dungeon Runners ftp. As of this writing the latest installer is named DungeonRunnersSetupGoldMaster.exe dated 02/07/08 12:00:00 AM.

20-something minutes (and 580MB) later the download should be done. When it is, run it. But first, if you had tried installing with the NCSoft downloader/launcher, uninstall it! In Ubuntu this can be done from the Applications > Wine > Uninstall Wine Software. Select to remove “PlayNC Launcher”. I could not remove the .NET install, so maybe just leave it as is and make sure to remove PlayNC.

The DungeonRunnersSetupGoldMaster.exe will install the game as well as an older version of the PlayNC Launcher. When the install is done, uncheck “Launch Dungeon Runners using the PlayNC Launcher”. We’re about to install the proper Linux launcher for the game.

Rather than having Wine launch the PlayNC launcher, we’ll be using the Universal Linux Launcher (ULL) for Dungeon Runners. The page warns of the ULL requiring Mono to be installed (and that you should pay attention to the README). Also for Ubuntu Hardy installations you should add the following repository to apt

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ajackson-bcs/ubuntu hardy main

for the installation. As I’m using Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, I’ll be ignoring the addition of the repo to my apt sources. Rather, I just first

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mono-gmcs xdelta

and then move into the directory

cd ~/Desktop/ULL-0.8
./configure
make
sudo make install

But pay attention to the ./configure because this is where you’ll be told if you’re missing any libraries. I was told I didn’t have “xdelta” installed, thus I had to apt-get install it to have ./configure not complain. Install what you need as ./configure alerts you. The ULL README also does a good job of telling you what you may be missing.

When you’ve configured, make’d and make installed the ULL then you can run it.

ULL

then select “Dungeon Runners” and click through the menus leaving all the settings default except for the “Game Directory”. This you will want to point to “Other” then .wine/drive_c/Program Files/NCSoft/Dungeon Runners where the executable lives.

When that’s done click “OK” and not “Quit”! The launcher should now tell you the client information, rather than a “Could not be found” error. Select “Dungeon Runners” to highlight it and then click “update” which will go through the process of updating the game. As of this writing, the patch is 128MB in size, patching the game from version 0.0.0.118 to 0.0.0.150.

When the patch is done updating, the “update” button will turn into a “launch” button. Click it and you are ready to play Dungeon Runners.

It appears, that as I was writing this tutorial as I was going through the steps, untested, that the process isn’t as squeeky-clean as it could be. My resolution wasn’t detected and when I booted into the game world, the graphics were less than satisfactory and even less playable.

The default Wine version, as of this writing, is wine-1.0.1 which may not be entirely compatible with this method. Your results may vary, so good luck.